ABSTRACT
The two months before I set sail for the US were, in retrospect, perhaps the most important two months of my professional life. They introduced me to the Unit, the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, where, across three separate visits, I was to spend over 30 years of my research career. I was unaware at the time of how scientifically distinguished it was, simply seeing it as a useful summer job that would allow me to earn a little money to take with me on my travels. It had been founded some 12 years earlier, based on a series of ongoing wartime projects under Bartlett’s general direction at the department of psychology in Cambridge, with Kenneth Craik as it first director. Craik was a brilliant and highly creative Scottish scientist who was at the forefront of introducing ideas from control engineering to the study of human behaviour but sadly was killed shortly after becoming director in a cycling accident, leaving Bartlett to take over.
